The guitarist Eric Clapton called his musical father
Everybody who has ever picked up a guitar has, on some level, yearned to emulate the infallible skills of Eric Clapton. He is, after all, one of the greatest guitarists to ever grace the airwaves. Like virtually every other guitarist, though, Clapton would have been adrift and rudderless were it not for the enduring efforts of his blues forefathers.
Blues has always been the root cause of the rock and roll realm, with those early rockstars back in the 1950s taking particularly heavy clues from obscure and overlooked American blues artists who were rarely given the opportunity to reach the mainstream. Clapton was no different, and even during the mind-expanding days of Cream and their psychedelic explorations, his playing style was always deeply indebted to the work of figures like Hubert Sumlin, BB King, and Muddy Waters.
Waters, in particular, had a colossal impact on the emergence of rock and roll rebellion, his blues-centric playing style altering everybody from Clapton to Keith Richards to the sheer power bestowed within the humble six-string. Clapton, to his credit, took that inspiration and ran with it, creating his own expansive guitar-fueled world, which soon culminated in his position among the most inventive and influential guitarists to ever get up on stage.
Over the course of his seemingly endless career within the musical realm, Clapton has been heaped with enough praise to last multiple lifetimes, now presiding over his position on the upper echelon of the rock world. Even still, the highest degree of praise he could ever have hoped to amass would surely be the approval of the heroes who first showed him the way. It must have been a bizarre experience, therefore, when he struck up something of a friendship with Muddy Waters himself.
During the Cream days, Clapton and the gang recorded a cover of ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’’, the blues standard that Waters had popularised back in the early 1950s. Seemingly, that was enough for the psychedelic masters to arrive on the radar of the ageing blues hero, and he remained in fairly close contact with Clapton until his ultimate death in 1983 – despite the Cream guitarist’s infamous racist rant in 1976 supporting Enoch Powell and rallying against “dark-skinned immigrants.”
In fact, Clapton referred to Waters in his 2007 memoir as “the father figure I never really had,” a sentiment which was seemingly reciprocated by the legendary guitarist. Even still, it was an uneasy expectation to place upon Clapton.
“You know, when Muddy said to me, I was like a son to him,” the guitarist once recalled to John Pidgeon. “I don’t know what he meant by that. I appreciated it and I took it, and I made it mine, but I don’t know what his motives were, and I don’t want to know either.”
“That’s almost the same as when you know you’ve played a really bad gig and someone comes and says, ‘You were fantastic tonight’, and you go, ‘Yeah, thanks very much’, and inside you’re going, ‘No, I wasn’t, what do you know about it? You weren’t out there,’” the guitarist shared, prefacing his uncertainty about Waters’ praise. “There is an element of that in there.”
Regardless of Clapton’s unease, though, Muddy Waters was a musical father figure in more ways than one. Not only did the pair foster a friendship during the 1970s and 1980s, but without Waters’ influence in the first place, Clapton might never have picked up a guitar at all.
